Friends Like Us Read online

  The next morning. My bed. A fleeting feeling, too vague to pin down. Something, somewhere, has shifted.

  A trapezoid of light peeks through the blinds, captures the dust in the air, and makes it beautiful. I hear my own breathing, slow and deep; my eyes blur and focus against the day. Up close, a loose purple thread pulls away from the quilt. My elbow itches. The pillow is smooth against my cheek.

  Someone is next to me, a lump under the covers, broad back, rumpled head of brown hair. A vague yes moves through me; I like this brown-haired lump. It mutters, moves.

  If I could stay like this I would, in these pleasantly muddy seconds when I haven’t figured it out yet, when I’m not yet the sum of my parts. But even while I’m thinking it, it’s coming back to me: I’m piecing together who I am even as I’m trying to keep myself at bay. My room, my bed, Declan, me. Don’t think about elephants! It’s too late. I run my tongue across my fuzzy teeth, find a cool spot on my pillow. Declan will turn over, say good morning, say good-bye; I’ll eat breakfast with Ben and Jane and go to work. Oh, but if I could, I would live in that other, newborn space for hours, fearless and observing. Because before I’m myself, I’m not the Willa I am: desperate, hungry, plumbing the depths of my own treacherous psyche and capable of unpleasant surprises. In that blissful, disoriented blankness, I could be anyone.

  I move through the next few days like a stunt double of myself. There is a proposal, an acceptance, a celebration. We all go out for dinner and splurge on wine. I drink a little bit too much and let my giddiness stand in for genuine happiness.

  I make them a card, a sketch of Ben and Jane holding hands on a sun-dappled beach, beaming, only instead of writing Congratulations! on the inside, I write You’re welcome! and when they open it, they both look at me confused, like I am their strange, special little niece. I bake them a batch of celebratory chocolate chip cookies, but I forget to put in the sugar. I’m off-kilter, myself and not-myself, a simulacrum Willa with no other options than to act normal. I have the vague sense that this is life: the long, slow, doomed attempt to become the person you’re trying to be.

  At the kitchen table one afternoon, I make a list of new names for myself. Could I possibly be a Maude? An April? A Debbie? Change your name, change your life. I want to do something both radical and risk-free, but nothing comes to mind. I consider a tattoo, but I’m afraid of needles, as well as alcohol, pain, and strangers with tattoos.

  I decide, finally, to chop off my hair. But then Jane reminds me that my head is a funny shape. “Tell you what, conehead,” she says, raising her hand protectively to her own hair. “I’ll give you a haircut. Just a couple of inches. That’s something, but it’s not everything. And it’s free. And if you don’t like it, Debbie, you can schedule an appointment and get it all hacked off. You have nothing to lose!”

  How can I argue with “nothing to lose”?

  Jane drapes a towel around my shoulders and spritzes my hair with water, running her fingers through the curls. “So, doll,” she says, snapping her pretend gum. “Ya interested in a permanent wave today?”

  “Bouffant,” I say. “Lots of Aqua Net.” We’re quiet for a minute. Jane tugs gently. If hair is made up of dead cells, then your scalp is a graveyard. “So,” I say, a chatty lady in a beauty shop, casual as anything, “are you thinking about the actual wedding yet?”

  She tries to pull a wide-toothed comb through my hair, but it gets caught halfway down. “All I know is I want something very, very fancy, obscenely expensive. Perhaps a destination wedding.”

  “Jamaica,” I say, “and eight hundred of your closest friends?”

  “Hawaii, and nine hundred.”

  “With an ice sculpture and seventeen bridesmaids.”

  “An ice sculpture of seventeen bridesmaids.” She gives up on the comb, kneels down in front of me, and stares intently, first at one side of my head, then the other, pulling hunks of my hair straight. I can smell her, minty breath and apple-perfumed shampoo and, underneath that, an unmistakably Jane-ish scent, two parts carrot cake, one part wood chips. She slips a hand under my chin and tilts my head up. “I’m going to take a good two inches off,” she says.

  “A good two inches.” I try to nod, but her hand holds my head still. “Okay,” I say, “and after the marriage vows are spoken, one hundred white doves will be released.”

  “And then after that,” she says, “one hundred colorful balloons.”

  “Pieces of which will get caught in the throats of the hungry doves, who will then, tragically, come plummeting to the earth.”

  “Ah, perfect.” Jane straightens and walks slowly around me, like a bride circling her groom at a Jewish wedding. I would mention this to her, but sometimes it’s just too much effort, trying to explain these things to Jane Elizabeth Weston from Marcy, Wisconsin, whose parents never thought twice about her initials.

  “The bride wore tulle,” I say instead.

  “The bride was a tool.” She starts snipping. I close my eyes to the slicing sound of it, surrendering to Jane’s warm nearness, her knuckles occasionally brushing my cheeks, my ears.

  “The dress was hand-beaded by tiny fairies,” I say. My eyes are still closed.

  “The groom rode in on an elephant.”

  “Shrimp!”

  “The groom rode in on a shrimp?”

  “No. For dinner. Nothing says classy like shrimp cocktail at a wedding.”

  “Ben hates shrimp,” Jane says.

  “No, he doesn’t.”

  “But he does.” She’s behind me now, clipping away, and then tugging the hair straight to check for accuracy. “Whoops!”

  “Whoops?” She’s silent. “Whoops?”

  “Nope, it’s okay. I fixed it!”

  I shrug. This is the secret of curly hair: you can’t really mess it up. “I’ve known Ben a lot longer than you have,” I say. “I think I’d know if he hated shrimp.”

  “He loathes them. He can’t stand their pink, veiny, curled-up bodies.” Snip. Tug. “Says they remind him of maggots.”

  “Wow. I find this very hard to believe. Maybe you’re confusing Ben with someone else who hates shrimp.” Dougie, I think. Maybe Dougie hates shrimp.

  She’s quiet for a while. I crane my neck. She’s behind me, motionless, scissors poised above my head. “You have.”

  “I have what?”

  “You’ve known him longer. But I know that he doesn’t like shrimp.” She walks around me again, her bare feet softly slapping the floor, then squats down in front of me, close. She has a freckle just above her lip, a tiny smudge of mascara underneath her right eye.

  “In lieu of gifts,” I say, “the bride and groom request donations to the Anti-Crustacean-Defamation League.”

  She cups my chin again, her fingers cool, her face so close her humid breath moistens my cheek. “Damn,” she whispers. “I’m sorry. I really should have put in my contact lenses before I did this.” She tilts her head and squints. “Kidding! It looks great.” She brushes off my neck, my shoulders. Curls of hair carpet the kitchen floor like tiny crescent moons—like shrimp!

  I will help them plan their wedding. We wouldn’t be here without Willa. She brought us together! I will wear a pretty dress. I will toast their happy union, their joyful years. My rotten heart thuds a protest. I can’t meet her eyes. What about me? I take a deep breath through my nose. What about me? Jane is staring hard, scrutinizing, and suddenly I’m about to implode from it, from the pressure of the closeness; you can tolerate a thing for a long time before it reveals itself to be fatal, and it’s been fatal all along. Jane rocks back on her heels. “All done.” She licks her lips, smiles. “You, my friend, are ready for your close-up.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  A few days later, Seth calls. There is a loud whooshing noise in the background. It sounds like he’s standing on the shoulder of a highway or inside a washing machine. “So guess what, little sister? Mom’s coming!” His phone cuts in and out. Ssswhat, ister? Mom’s ing!


  “That’s hilarious,” I say. “You’re hilarious.” Seth and I manage our relationship, or lack of relationship, with Fran and Stan by visiting them just once a year, at Thanksgiving—first Mom and Jerry in the morning, for the traditional Thanksgiving bagel brunch, then Dad and Tan Lesley for dinner. Conveniently, although my parents haven’t spoken in five years, they live within ten minutes of each other, in adjacent gated communities with abutting golf courses. Once, my mom said, she thought she saw Lesley from the sixth hole and waved; it turned out to be a small dead tree.

  “It’s not a joke. She’s worried about you.” Not a oke. rried about you. He pauses. “Okay, she’s worried about me. She’s coming to help me move into the new apartment.”

  “Oh, Seth.”

  “Oh, Willa.”

  “Oh, kids!” A week later Fran sits in the rickety folding chair in Seth’s kitchen, which makes it, I guess, the kitchen chair.

  When I left my apartment this morning, Jane and Ben were sitting in the kitchen, filling out “Save the Date” cards. Save the date! Save the date!—the wildest and most elusive of the endangered tree fruits. The pile of cards grew into a stack on the table as they worked.

  Fran takes a sip from her Styrofoam cup of tea and waves her hand toward us. “That couch needs to be moved back three inches toward the wall, and then to the left about, oh, five feet, and then out the door and into the Dumpster.” She chuckles at her own joke. “It’s disgusting!”

  It really is: it’s yellow, but a mustardy sort of shade that looks like it started out as something closer to ketchup on the color wheel, and threadbare in a way that makes you think of butts.

  “Where did you get it, Sethie?” she asks. “Not from your old place. Nina would never have …” She shakes her head. “Oh, sweetie, I’m sorry.” She shifts her attention back to the apartment and rearranges her expression. “Let’s hit some yard sales tomorrow,” she says. “See if we can’t scare you up a nicer sofa.”

  Mom loved Nina. Just like I did, she loved what Nina did for Seth, how she softened him, settled him, smoothed his rough edges. His squalid new life seems to be causing her physical pain—which is having the fun-house mirror effect of distorting Seth’s own emotions. In the face of her overwhelming sympathy, my brother is confused and defensive. He swipes a sleeve across his sweaty forehead, glances around his grimy new apartment, and lets out a little sigh. He peers down at his couch, personal failure in the form of a sofa, then looks at me like a trapped bunny. I recognize that look, and the sorry lift of his shoulders, as the secret language of two people who survived the same childhood: it’s a last-ditch apology, preemptive but meaningless, for how he’s about to hang me out to dry. “Hey, Mom! Godzwilla has something to tell you. She has a new boyfriend!”

  In the bathroom, just five minutes ago, as we were rummaging through a box full of towels and, oddly, canned soup, I asked Seth not to say anything about Declan. “You know how she is,” I whispered, appealing to my brother’s empathy, that underused muscle. “You know how she’ll be.” She’d be overly invested in my personal life, I meant; she’d manage to be both eager and concerned in the same breath. It’s her talent, forged in the fires of her crappy marriage. When I was in seventh grade, she used to sit down with me after school, pass me a plate of celery and peanut butter, and fix her maternal gaze on my face. “Was anyone not nice to you today?” she would ask, her eyes boring into mine. “Did any of your girlfriends behave badly toward you? Because I will call their parents if you want me to.”

  Now, she claps her hands in glee and scowls at me simultaneously. “A boyfriend!” she says. “Is he someone special? Is he one of the ones?” I sense that divorce and remarriage have made her flexible, in a strange way.

  I smile at Seth and pick up the scissors we’ve been using to slice the packing tape on his cardboard boxes, brandish it at him and then stab a hole in the seam of a box labeled PLATES, CUPS, SHOES, TWIZZLERS. All right, I think, trying to rally. This is not so bad. I hadn’t planned on collapsing these two particular emotional tent poles, but what the hell. I’ll introduce my irreverent, used-to-be-my-boss, dumped-me-three-years-ago-for-another-girl Irish boyfriend to my mom. So what if he interprets it as a move toward serious-relationship status and runs for the hills? So what? Why not? I’ll do it! Yes!

  “Uh, no!” I say. “I do not have a boyfriend. Seth! What a weird thing to say!”

  Seth mouths Sorry. He lifts his shirt to rub his pale, hairy, newly chubby belly.

  “Why are you still single?” I say.

  “If you have a beau,” my mom says, “I would like to meet him.”

  I fold back the box flaps and start pulling out badly wrapped, mismatched plates and bags of red licorice. “Seth, seeing as all the furniture belonged to Nina, why don’t we just keep a few of these boxes so you can turn them over and use them as cute, portable end tables. Martha Stewart Living in Squalor!”

  “We could go to Will’s apartment right now,” Seth says. He squats down next to BATHROOM & CANDLESTICKS & SOME SOCKS, rips the tape off with a phhhlrrtt. “See if he’s there.”

  “And, hey, maybe Mom has an old coat in storage,” I say, “that you could use for a bedspread. It’s a good thing!” I wave air quotes at him.

  “Oh, and your roommate’s probably there, too, with her fiancé, right? We can say hello to them, see how they’re doing, your roommate and her fiancé.”

  “Because Nina kept the bedspread, right? Along with the sheets and the pillows and the bed? When she kicked you out?”

  Seth gives me the finger, and I think, We’ve gone too far; and I think, Why do we even pretend to be friends? And then he laughs.

  “Kids,” Fran says. She takes another sip of tea. “Why don’t we get out of this apartment, hop in my car, and hit those rummage sales right now?”

  Fran’s shiny silver rental car smells like secondhand smoke, which probably comes with the contract: choose a midsize sedan for its extra legroom and the lingering odor of tobacco.

  “I never cared for Milwaukee,” Mom says, honking at the car in front of us as it sits at the green light, unmoving. “Scene of the crime.”

  “Scene of our childhood, too,” I say from the backseat, surprisingly offended. “Scene of that time when we were little and we tried to make you a birthday cake out of pancake mix and you pretended you loved it. Scene of your daughter winning the regional spelling bee when she was in fifth grade. Scene of practically our entire lives.” I pull on the seat belt’s shoulder strap, which is digging into my neck.

  “You’re so sensitive, honey.” My parents moved from Chicago to Milwaukee in the seventies for my father’s job, just after they got married: ninety-two miles, but a continent of culture shock for my mother and, apparently, light-years of regret. “I love you and Seth, I just don’t like this one-horse town.” She lays on the horn again as the old lady in the car in front of us, her gray head barely visible above the seat back, finally guns it through the light just as it turns yellow.

  “The feelings associated with a place can become an emotional crutch,” Seth says, “a habit that, sometimes, can only be broken by physically moving away. Paralysis can come in many forms.”

  “The self-help section at Barnes and Noble is still working for you,” I say. Seth nods.

  “Look!” Fran says. “A sale!” We’ve been cruising up and down Lake Drive and its side streets, trawling the city’s tony east side for good rummage sales, most of which have closed down for the day. But one or two football field–;sized front lawns are still strewn with the flotsam of the wealthy—last year’s chrome-and-steel espresso machines; racks of brightly colored Ingrid Sédersstrém children’s clothes; once-pricey, roughed-up Woodley end tables; and Ashford and Holt chairs in need of reupholstering. My mother is the queen of spotting diamonds in the rough. (Jerry, she likes to tell us, had a comb-over when she met him and was wearing Transitions lenses.) She’ll end up in the headlines someday for buying that funny-looking, paint-splattered canvas tha
t had been stashed for sixty years in someone’s garage. (Gosh, we didn’t know Grandma’s old friend Jackson was famous!)

  Now, she swings a left turn from the right lane and pulls onto Kenwood. “I see a love seat,” she says, peering out the window. “Looks spendy. Let’s see if we can’t Lutheran them down.” Fran wasn’t kidding about not liking it here, and she’s sharpened her blade since the last time I saw her.

  Seth gets out of the car slowly. A cloud of melancholy and regret has been hanging over him for months now as he’s been embarking on this crummy new chapter of his life. It’s so heavy I can practically see it, can almost smell it. In fact, if melancholy and regret smell like hummus and a sweaty T-shirt and some kind of unfortunate masculine body spray, I can smell it. He slouches against the car. “Great,” he says, his voice vaulting toward cynicism but landing on surrender. “A love seat.”

  Our mother is already furiously negotiating by the time Seth and I make our way over to her; we stand back and elbow each other, let her do her thing. “I understand that this piece has been well maintained,” she says to a woman in a linen pantsuit, “but I also see a small rip in the fabric here and several scratches near the base. I’ll give you two hundred dollars for it.” She plants her hands on her hips and waits for the inevitable nod.

  The expansive lawn is crowded with bargain hunters. A pregnant lady is lugging a high chair to her waiting minivan, leaving a long trail in the grass: the tracks of the nesting human in her native habitat. A little way across the lawn, a couple examines a table stacked with china and kitchenware. I notice the woman with her back to us, her red hair twisted up in a messy, pretty ponytail, her small frame in a flowy green sundress. Thin, freckled arms; canvas sneakers. And then I register who she is. The man she’s with is tall, dark haired, in a crisp purple shirt and jeans that say I’m a young lawyer and it’s the weekend. They’re leaning into each other, his arm around her resting just above her hip. I gasp before my brain catches up with itself, before I can tamp down my surprise, and I hop in front of Seth, trying to position myself in his sight line. “Bamboo!” I yelp, heaving an umbrella stand up toward my brother. “Look, Seth, it’s bamboo!”